December 4, 2025
Read about this class:
This class with Dr. Cade Copeland, DC and Cason Lehman, PTA, PLCC builds on Part 1 of the series. In the first class, they defined what stress is, when it starts, the mental–chemical–physical model, and why it is so damaging when the body gets stuck in “fight or flight.”
In this second class, they focus on one central question: how can stress be measured in the body? Their answer rests on three main tools: blood chemistry, heart rate variability (HRV), and x-rays of the spine and neck.
Cason begins with blood work. The numbers on a lab report matter, but he emphasizes that those numbers only make sense when paired with a person’s story. He引用s the idea that “the body keeps the score”: tissues, organs, and blood carry the imprint of life events, medications, surgeries, antibiotics, and long-term stress.
He describes a patient whose triglycerides were very high. On paper, her diet looked clean and she was already dealing with autoimmune issues. Only at the end of the consultation did she share that her son had died by suicide the previous year and that two previous husbands had also died. For Cason, that loss and cumulative emotional stress helped explain why her body was showing such a disrupted pattern, even when diet alone did not.
The class walks through how very basic panels can already reveal a lot about stress and physiology: a complete blood count with differential, a comprehensive metabolic panel, a lipid panel, and iron markers. Cason reads these not just as numbers but as cellular physiology: what individual cells are doing, whether they have enough nutrients, and how they are handling load.
He explains the levels of organization in the body: cells form tissues, tissues form organs, organs form systems, and together they make the whole person. If the cell is not right, nothing above it can be fully right. That is why he repeats a core line: “You have to fix the cell to get well.”
From there, he contrasts functional blood ranges with the broad “normal” ranges used in conventional medicine. He mentions learning from Dr. Bryan Walsh (Metabolic Fitness Pro), who builds reference ranges from clinical literature and longevity data, not just from averages in sick populations.
An example is cholesterol. A total cholesterol over 200 is often treated as the same problem in everyone and used to justify a statin. Cason notes that this number means very different things for a 16-year-old male than for a 65-year-old female, and that age and sex matter.
He also critiques parts of the functional medicine testing industry. Stool tests, food sensitivity panels, Dutch hormone tests, and hair mineral analyses can have a place, but they are often expensive, poorly validated, and prone to false positives and false negatives. Cade shares that he used Dutch testing for years, and only later realized that many patients weren’t improving because the foundations at the cellular level were never corrected. Both presenters insist that basic blood chemistry, interpreted properly, is still the highest “bang for the buck” before moving into more exotic testing.
The next tool is heart rate variability (HRV).
Cade defines HRV as a measurement of the autonomic nervous system and its ability to be resilient under stress. A higher, appropriate HRV indicates better recovery, more restorative sleep, better oxygen delivery to tissues, more emotional regulation, a stronger immune system, and a lower risk of chronic disease. A chronically low HRV suggests that the body is stuck in sympathetic overdrive—living on the “gas pedal” of fight-or-flight.
Cason frames it simply:
They explain that exercise, sleep, breathing patterns, emotional load, relationships, and nutrition all move HRV up or down. The same behavior can be helpful in one person and too much in another, which is why feedback matters.
They list several wearable devices that track HRV, such as Whoop straps, Oura rings, Garmin watches, and Polar straps. Cade notes that he likes devices with no monthly subscription (like Polar), while many popular tools have ongoing fees.
Cason cautions against over-focusing on a single HRV number. Each device uses its own algorithm, so absolute values differ. What matters is personal baseline and trend: where a person usually sits, and how HRV responds when they change sleep, diet, breathing, or training.
HRV becomes a way to test real-time practices: a breathing exercise, a chiropractic adjustment, a change in bedtime. If HRV rises appropriately afterwards, the practice is helping the body move back toward the parasympathetic “brake pedal.”
They show a graph where HRV tends to be higher in younger adults and naturally declines with age, reflecting reduced resilience to stressors like hard workouts, poor sleep, or alcohol. The point is not to chase a perfect number, but to use HRV as a living marker of recovery and regulation.
They also briefly mention devices that not only measure HRV but actively stimulate the vagus nerve to shift the body toward parasympathetic tone. Those tools will come back into focus in the third class when they talk about practical strategies.
From there, Cade turns to the nervous system and spinal structure as the third major window into stress.
He starts with a series of simple questions:
He answers them by showing an ultrasound image of his first baby. The brain forms first, then the spinal cord, and then branches extend outward to every organ system. The nervous system is the master communication network that directs development and ongoing function.
They play a short video of an embryo forming a spinal cord and branching nerves in just sixteen hours of development. Cade points out a thick descending branch he identifies as the vagus nerve, already emerging as a major pathway in those first hours.
He quotes BJ Palmer, an early chiropractic leader, who said that every organ is connected to “the one under your hat”—the brain. Another Palmer quote contrasts medicine as the study of death and disease with chiropractic as the study of life and what causes people to live.
The big idea is that the nervous system sits on top of all other systems. Nutritional work matters, but without intact nerve signaling, even good food and supplements can only go so far.
To illustrate structure, Cade uses the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The bridge has to be strong and flexible enough to handle distance, vehicle load, and high winds. That balance is built into its shape.
He compares this to the human spine.
He shows lumbar x-rays and MRIs:
That damaged structure affects nerves that travel to the digestive system, adrenal glands, pelvic floor, and reproductive organs. Problems in these regions often trace back not just to local tissue, but to compromised electrical signaling from the spine.
He then moves to the cervical spine (the neck). Loss of the normal curve there leads to a cascade of neurological problems—often described with multiple “D” words such as degeneration and dysregulation. One key issue is dysautonomia: the automatic functions of the body (emotions, digestion, heart rhythm, sleep) become unstable.
Cade shares images of a patient named Tony, whose MRI shows multiple disc problems and bone spurs compressing the spinal cord. He also shows x-rays of Tony’s wife, Sharon, whose cervical spine had degenerated to the point that surgery and fusion became the only option to stabilize it. She is safer but has ongoing pain and greatly reduced motion.
The key connection the class makes is this: structure dictates function. When spinal structure is compromised, functioning of the nervous system and the organs it serves inevitably follows.
The vagus nerve is central to their explanation of stress and structure.
Cade uses a simple image:
When a person is repeatedly pushed into fight-or-flight, the “engine” of stress responsiveness becomes like a Ferrari, while the brake system becomes as weak as a tricycle’s brakes. That imbalance makes it very hard to slow down physiologically, even when the external situation is calm.
The class returns to the video of the developing vagus nerve and then maps where it travels:
If the neck loses its healthy curve and the head drifts forward, structural changes at the top of the spine place mechanical pressure on the vagus nerve. This is not something a person can simply “breathe out,” “eat out,” or “supplement away.” In this model, the mechanical compression must be addressed to restore full parasympathetic capacity.
To illustrate how location matters, Cade shows a cross-section of a nerve: a bundle of many smaller fibers. Pressure in one region may affect branches going to the ear; pressure in another may affect fibers going to the stomach or vocal cords. Symptoms in distant organs may still be tracing back to how that bundle is compressed near the neck.
He uses Christopher Reeve’s horse-riding accident as a dramatic example. Damage at the C1 level of the neck left his conscious mind intact, but signals could no longer travel from the brain to the body. Artificial support was required for his heart, lungs, digestion, and elimination, not because those organs were inherently broken, but because nerve communication had been cut off at the top.
The class also cites a 2005 study in the journal Spine involving 752 participants. The more a person’s head drifted forward (forward head posture), the worse every measure of health became—not just oxygen levels, not just mental status or mood, but overall function.
Conventional responses to severe structural problems often involve medications and surgery, including fusion procedures to pull the spine back and keep it from collapsing further. Cade acknowledges that in some advanced cases, such as Sharon’s, surgical intervention may be necessary.
However, he contrasts outcomes based on a person’s “first touch” for back pain:
He poses the question of whether profit incentives and a focus on procedures shape these patterns, and whether many surgeries might be avoided by earlier attention to structure and nerve function.
Cason adds from his own experience as a former physical therapist who shifted fully into a chiropractic-centered model. He notes that compression in the spine doesn’t just affect nerves; it also alters the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, which bathes the brain and spinal cord. Over time, that disruption can set the stage for a wide range of downstream problems. In his view, restoring curves and relieving pressure is not optional—it is simply honoring basic design, or as they often say, not trying to negotiate with Mother Nature.
By the end of the class, the picture is clear:
This session stays focused on measurement and understanding. In the next class, scheduled for the eighteenth, Cason will lead a deeper exploration of practical steps: how to use these insights to build resilience, strengthen the “brake pedal,” and support the body’s design to heal and regulate itself.
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